Local Interest

Two long-time African-American community activists, Terry Townsend and Martel Miller, will be holding a press conference on Friday, Feb. 27, 4 p.m. at the University YMCA in the Board Room (1001 S Wright St., Champaign). They are releasing a report documenting the failure of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fulfill its land grant mission of providing accessibility to all residents of Illinois, particularly its African-American residents.

On Thursday, Feb. 19, the Coalition for Police Demilitarization will make its first appearance before the Champaign County Board. The attached statement agreed to by the entire coalition, an assembly of 23 different groups, will be delivered by Rev. Melinda Carr, of the Ministerial Alliance of Champaign and Vicinity during public comment (the meeting begins at 6:30 p.m., with public comment near the beginning). We are a coalition of students, community members, people of faith, labor organizations, artists, civil libertarians, and people across racial and ethnic lines concerned about the growing trend of police militarization.

UCIMC joins MAG-Net and allies in counting down the days to the most historic FCC vote of our lifetimes. We applaud Chairman Wheeler for listening to the 7+ million public comments and coming out in support of Net Neutrality. We expect the FCC to vote in favor of the people and against the Comcast/Verizon/ATT oligopoly. Click below to call your rep and tell them "don't stand in the way of the FCC - stand up for Net Neutrality!"

***We'll be having a watch party at the IMC Thursday, Feb. 26, 8:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Join the Facebook page here.

Despite overwhelming opposition, tonight Urbana City Council voted to allow the Urbana Police Department to carry tasers. Tasers are weapons that use 50,000 watts of power to temporarily disable people. Although referred to as non-lethal, they have been linked to over 600 deaths in the US.

On Monday, November 10, about 70 Friends of James Kilgore held a press conference outside the Henry Adminstration building on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus. They encouraged the Board of Trustees, meeting this Thursday, to reinstate Dr. Kilgore.

The Illinois chapter of NORML (National Organization to Reform marijuana Laws) fully supports Karen Lewis’s plan to legalize and regulate the adult cannabis market. While Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to decriminalize cannabis statewide is a step in the right direction it simply does not go far enough.

Decriminalization does nothing to curb the violence associated with the illegal cannabis trade and does nothing to prevent cannabis from getting in the hands of young people, especially teenagers. While decriminalization would reduce the stigma of having a criminal record it would still be against the law to consume this plant, and the manufacturing and distribution of this product would still be controlled by criminals, often violent gangs and drug cartels.

What’s next, now that the University of Illinois Board of Trustees has voted down Steven Salaita’s job? September 18, Katherine Franke, a top national scholar of law, religion, and human rights, spoke at a community conversation focused on academic freedom, political dissent, and particular legal issues involved in political action on Israel-Palestine as well as the firing of Salaita from a tenured faculty position.

Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University, is paying her own way to speak at the
Independent Media Center in Urbana. Joining more than 5000 other faculty who are boycotting the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she announced her decision
to cancel a previously scheduled speaking engagement at UIUC in a September 2 letter to Chancellor Phyllis Wise. (See Letter from Katherine Franke.)

Republican candidate for governor Bruce Rauner announced earlier this week that, if he had been in office, he would have vetoed Illinois' new law, which allows seriously ill patients access to medical cannabis. Rauner also said he preferred a system that would make business licenses available only to the highest bidders in order to raise money for state coffers.

Governor Quinn, who signed the medical marijuana bill in 2013, took exception to the comments, pointing out that the process is both competitive and transparent. His campaign called Rauner’s statements “heartless” and stressed that the law "will ease pain and provide relief for cancer patients (and) severely ill people."

Rather, it was, in effect, a pre-empetive firing based on the assumption that his tweets would make him a bad teacher.

This transparent use of “civility” as a cover to fire a professor with outspoken views on Israel is almost identical to the pretext that was given by DePaul University in 2007 to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein.

In that case, DePaul denied Finkelstein tenure on the vague grounds that he lacked “collegiality.”

Dozens from Illinois Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, CU Immigration Forum, CU Citizens for Peace and Justice, Citizens with Conviction and other groups working for social justice in Champaign Urbana, gathered for an all-day workshop to learn media production.

In the IMC's newly created computer training classroom, participants used Audacity, free audio production software,to make short audio pieces.

DJ BJ showed people the ropes using the board in the WRFU 104.5 FM studio. Participants tried their hand speaking on air, then walked outside to view the 100 foot radio tower which broadcasted their message to all of Urbana, Champaign, and Savoy - all with 100 watts, or the power of a lightbulb.

Americans for Safe Access, the national medical marijuana patient's right organization has just released a national compilation of its evaluation of state medical marijuana laws. Although Illinois had a MMJ provision in its cannabis laws since the late 1970s, it was never more than a bit of window dressing and totally ineffective in protecting patients from prosecutors bent on running up their conviction rates. They simply ignored that part of the law, while prosecuting patients under the provisions of the law they are personally inclined to enforce.

That changed in 2013 when after years of trying, Illinois passed and Governor Quinn signed a MMJ law. While a small advance from the dreadful status patients faced previously, it is struggling to get off the ground, with significant doubts as to its ability to create improved access for patients, supply their needs at a reasonable cost, and prevent law enforcement abuse of patients.

After savaging public education in Chicago, Philly, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Vallas has been summoned home to Illinois by the Democrat governor as his running mate.

by Bruce Dixon

There are many things upon which elite corporate Democrats are in complete agreement with elite corporate Republicans. Often enough they are far more important to the way we live our lives than the cultural rhetoric and stylistic fluff that separates the two parties. Both Republicans and Democrats agree on empire and the wars needed to preserve it. They both agree gentrification, stadiums, and tax breaks for the wealthy are the only way to economically develop cities. They both know that poor and working people ought to subsidize a new round of predatory accumulation with lowered wages, plundered pensions, fiscal austerity and the privatization of public education.

1) End the Drug War now. No one should be arrested or prosecuted for possession
or selling any recreational intoxicant to a consenting adult. Disband all narcotic units,
release all prisoners who are currently incarcerated for drug possession and drug selling,
and expunge all criminal records of everyone whoever suffered under this hypocritical, draconian and ineffective policy for the last 40 years.

2) Publish the pictures, names, and badge numbers of all officers; and post this
listing in the lobby of the Champaign Police Department, the lobby of the public
safety building at the U of I and the sheriff's office or courthouse, like is done over at Urbana's
municipal building. Police officers are government employees and, like politicians, have no reasonable expectation to "employee privacy." (residency exempted, of course.)

Marijuana possession arrests are down 32% in Urbana, but justice in the rest of the county and across the state is very uneven.

by ICDP/Roosevelt University

Illinois is one of the least friendly places in the nation for those caught possessing small amounts of marijuana, a new study by Roosevelt University’s Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy suggests.

An emphasis on misdemeanor arrests for possession and a lack of consistency in implementing local pot-ticket laws typify how cases involving small amounts of marijuana possession frequently are handled in Illinois, according to the report that looks at misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests vs. tickets.

Illinois ranked fifth in the nation for the number of marijuana arrests made in 2010, and the state ranked first in the country for its high proportion of marijuana possession arrests vs. marijuana sales/distribution arrests. A whopping 98.7 percent of marijuana arrests in Illinois were cases involving simple possession, according to the study.

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